Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture Website

Every October, the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events coordinate a month-long festival of workshops, tours, art walks, exhibitions, and other events that showcase the talent and vibrancy of the city’s art community. In past years, sharing up-to-the-minute information on events, schedule changes, and new additions to the line-up proved a laborious affair with their existing online infrastructure, so they turned to Mightybytes to streamline their online communications process.

OUR APPROACH
With hundreds of artists and events spread over the course of an entire month, the Chicago Artists Month site required that content exist in multiple locations at once. To accomplish this, our first challenge was to organize vast amounts of event and artist-related data in a visually intuitive manner. We undertook a streamlined discovery phase thanks to clear direction from the CAM team and specific project requirements defined up front.

Our Discovery process included the following:

• The site was built based on hand-sketched wireframes, which saved development time.
• Existing brand guidelines were provided by the client and offered a clear path to completing design comps on time.

Having a solid process in place for deployment early on helped maintain the project’s tight schedule.

IMPLEMENTATION
A significant portion of the site content is populated from another site, Chicago Artists Resource. Integration of content between the two sites enhances user experience and allows users to enter content only once rather than in each individual location. We implemented a content tagging system that allowed individual events and entries to be included in multiple categories.